The incongruence of SA's leadership crisis

A lack of trust, an inability to confront difficult home truths and the disconnect between leaders who were living lives of largesse and an impoverished electorate were some of the problems contributing to the leadership crisis in this country, according to Dr Mamphela Ramphele.

The former MD of the World Bank and trustee on the board of the Rockefeller Foundation in New York said South Africa's post-apartheid project was “in danger of becoming another tragedy on the African continent”.

Speaking at a leadership conference held in Johannesburg recently, Dr Ramphele spoke out harshly against government plans to try and gag the media. She asked the predominantly business audience what they were doing to speak out about the issues. "The Protection of Information Bill and the tribunal should rouse all citizens from the slumber we seem to have fallen in since 1994,” she said.

“Politicians who feel under siege will attack the weaknesses in the current cadre of journalism,” she said, adding that there were lessons to be learned in the Bush era in terms of what was done by the media in the name of patriotism. “We have to be extremely careful not to be brow beaten into believing that handing over control of the media is a solution to the problem of our country.” Dr Ramphele said Steve Biko's words in “I write what I like” offered sound guidance for a South Africa that was being ruled by the politics of fear.

Leading by example and speaking out fearlessly about government failures, Dr Ramphele said the government's reconstruction and development programmes and black economic empowerment had not delivered, and instead created a system of terrible dependencies.

“Fifteen years of implementation of the reconstruction and development programme, and the black economic empowerment programme to address the legacy of socio-economic discrimination, has yet to show sustainable benefit in the everyday lives of poor people in this country,” she said, adding that government's RDP efforts demobilised citizens who used to be active participants in their own development and the upliftment of their communities.

Dr Ramphele spoke out harshly against government plans to try and gag the media.

Mandy de Waal, contributor, ITWeb

Dr Ramphele said a major problem of the RDP approach was that it was “turning people who should be holding the government accountable into supplicants and recipients of government handouts. The resultant dependence authored a vicious cycle of dependence by the political elite of the dependency of the electorate,” she said.

Alongside the warning that government control of the media would not solve its problems, Dr Ramphele's strong message to the ruling party was that transparency and accountability couldn't be sustained in an environment that fostered handouts and dependencies.

Travelling deeper into her critique, Dr Ramphele said black economic empowerment had not lived up to its promise. “BEE has had far too many unintended consequences to be continued in its present form. The codes of good practice have clearly fostered a compliant culture rather than a transformative culture that promotes entrepreneurship and the sustainable development of our economy.” She said a focus on political patronage, rather than the empowerment of a broad base of South Africans, had denied ordinary people economic benefits.

Dr Ramphele pointed our four key areas of failure. These were education and skills training; health and HIV/Aids; unemployment, poverty and growing inequality; as well as crime and insecurity. She said unemployment and poverty had contributed to building anger among young people in this country, while the issue of crime created growing fear. “That fear, and a lack of trust in the criminal justice system, is driving the privatisation of security by wealthy people and seeing poor people resort to mob justice, or injustice.”

The missing link in all of these four tragic failures in South Africa, and elsewhere in Africa, was the acknowledgement and mobilisation of the inventiveness of ordinary people to tackle development challenges. “Material poverty does not signal a poverty of inventiveness,” she said. “On the contrary, poor people survive by their wits and have much more to contribute to addressing complex problems than we give them credit for.” The lack of acknowledging this lay behind the “insult that is metered out to people who are given RDP houses.” She added that these handouts were “salt in the wound of indignity of poverty”.

What should rather be considered was assisting poor people to build homes, she said, as this was the hallmark of manhood and maturity in most traditional societies. Handouts and RDP housing was like “heaping humiliation on top of the legacy of humiliation of apartheid,” Dr Ramphele said.

There was a huge divergence between leaders and citizens in South Africa that was leading to failed government, because of leaders living in largesse, becoming 'tenderpreneurs', sending their children to fancy schools while a disenfranchised public had no recourse. “Incongruence is what lives at the heart of South Africa's leadership problem,” said Dr Ramphele.